Earthscan Food and Agriculture

Earthscan Food and Agriculture

This series includes a wide range of inter-disciplinary approaches to food and agriculture, integrating perspectives from both social and natural sciences. It includes textbooks, research monographs and titles aimed at professionals, NGOs and policy-makers. Authors or editors of potential new titles should contact Tim Hardwick, Senior Commissioning Editor (tim.hardwick@tandf.co.uk).

Challenges and Opportunities

Rapid structural transformation and urbanization are transforming agriculture and food production in rural areas across the world. This textbook provides a comprehensive review and assessment of the multi-faceted nature of agriculture and rural development, particularly in the developing…

The Vitality of Latin America

In recent years, food studies scholarship has tended to focus on a number of increasingly abstract, largely unquestioned concepts with regard to how capital, markets and states organize and operate. This has led to a gulf between public policy and people’s realities with food as experienced in…

Long-term Dynamics in the Past, Present and Future

Using a political-economic approach supplemented with insights from human ecology, this volume analyses the long-term dynamics of food security and economic growth. The book begins by discussing the nature of preindustrial food crises and the changes that have occurred…

Evolution and exploitation

Over the last five centuries, plantation crops have represented the best and worst of industrialized agriculture – "best" through their agronomic productivity and global commercial success, and "worst" as examples of exploitative colonialism, conflict and ill-treatment of workers. This book traces…

Utilizing a model derived from literature on environmental justice (EJ) overlaid with multiple scales of agriculture, Environmental Justice and Farm Labor provides key insights about laborers in agriculture in the United States. It addresses three main topics: (1) justice-related issues…

Conflicts and Solutions

Feeding the world's growing human population is increasingly challenging, especially as more people adopt a western diet and lifestyle. Doing so without causing damage to nature poses an even greater challenge. This book argues that in order to create a sustainable food supply whilst conserving…

Building legal foundations for a new agriculture

Remarkable advances are being made in life science and agricultural research to reform the methods of food production, particularly with regard to staple grain and legume crops, in ways that will better reflect ecological realities. However, advances in science may be insufficient to…

Reconnecting food systems and sustainable development

Contemporary agriculture is often criticized for its industrial scale, adverse effects on nutrition, rural employment and the environment, and its disconnectedness from nature and culture. Yet there are many examples of traditional smaller scale systems that have survived the test of time and…

Two of the greatest current challenges are climate change (and variability) and food security. Feeding nine billion people by 2050 will require major efforts aimed at climate change adaptation and mitigation. One approach to agriculture has recently been captured by the widely adopted…

2nd Edition

In this second edition of The Sociology of Food and Agriculture, students are provided with a substantially revised and updated introductory text to this emergent field.
The book begins with the recent development of agriculture under capitalism and neo-liberal regimes, and the transformation of…

Revisiting the Recent Food Crises

Since the financial and food price crises of 2007, market instability has been a topic of major concern to agricultural economists and policy professionals. This volume provides an overview of the key issues surrounding food prices volatility, focusing primarily on drivers, long-term…

Improving Smallholder and Subsistence Farming

Through the integration of gender analysis into resilience thinking, this book shares field-based research insights from a collaborative, integrated project aimed at improving food security in subsistence and smallholder agricultural systems. The scope of the book is both local and…

Crisis, Resilience, and Restructuring

For the last three decades, the Neoliberal regime, emphasising economic growth through deregulation, market integration, expansion of the private sector, and contraction of the welfare state has shaped production and consumption processes in agriculture and food. These institutional arrangements…

Developing Resilient Urban Food Systems

As people increasingly migrate to urban settings and more than half of the world's population now lives in cities, it is vital to plan and provide for sustainable and resilient food systems which reflect this challenge. This volume presents experience and evidence-based "state of the art" chapters…

Building a New Paradigm

In response to the challenges of a growing population and food security, there is an urgent need to construct a new agri-food sustainability paradigm. This book brings together an integrated range of key social science insights exploring the contributions and interventions necessary to build this…

An Economic Approach

Many issues in food and agriculture are portrayed as increasingly polarized. These include industrial vs. sustainable agriculture, conventional vs. organic production methods, and global vs. local food sourcing, to name only three. This book addresses the origins, validity, consequences, and…

The agriculture system is under pressure to increase production every year as global population expands and more people move from a diet mostly made up of grains, to one with more meat, dairy and processed foods. This book uses a decade of primary research to examine how weather and…

The Social Costs of Eating Fresh

Over the last three decades there has been a rapid expansion of intensive production of fresh fruit and vegetables in the Mediterranean regions of south and west Europe. Much of this depends on migrating workers for seasonal labour, including from Eastern Europe, North Africa and Latin America.…

The Global Food Crisis and the Future of Agriculture

This book provides a critical assessment of the contemporary global food system in light of the heightening food crisis, as evidence of its failure to achieve food security for the world's population. A key aspect of this failure is identified in the neoliberal strategies which emphasize industrial…

This book discusses the issues of integration within food and fibre supply chains and the challenges in managing price risk. The problems of integration and price risk are interwoven in agricultural supply chains with production and supply risk as well as hoarding. However, without supply…

Precision agriculture (PA) involves the application of technologies and agronomic principles to manage spatial and temporal variation associated with all aspects of agricultural production in order to improve crop performance and environmental quality. The focus of this book is to introduce a…

An Introduction

This book offers a broad introduction to food policies in the United States. Real-world controversies and debates motivate the book’s attention to economic principles, policy analysis, nutrition science and contemporary data sources. It assumes that the reader's concern is not just the economic…

In this challenging work, the author argues that the goal of any food system should not simply be to provide the cheapest calories possible. A secure food system is one that affords people and nations – in both the present and future – the capabilities to prosper and lead long, happy, and healthy…

Promoting Social, Economic and Environmental Resilience

Aquaculture is the farming of aquatic organisms, principally fish, molluscs, crustaceans and marine algae. It has seen phenomenal worldwide growth in the past fifty years and many people view it as the best solution for the provision of high quality protein to feed the world's growing population,…

In recent years the issue of food security has become centre stage in the global agenda. Since the 2007/8 food price crisis, a number of works have been published on the topic, addressed from various perspectives: economic, social and cultural, environmental, agronomic and…

This book provides a timely analysis and assessment of the potential of organic agriculture (OA) for rural development and the improvement of livelihoods. It focuses on smallholders in developing countries and in countries of economic transition, but there is also coverage of and comparisons with…

Improving Food Security

Why have food crises seemingly become more frequent in recent years, compared to the last few decades? This book examines an array of different issues and distortions that are causing food supply chain dysfunction in many countries, particularly for staple non-perishable foods such as grains,…

As interest has increased in topics such as the globalization of the agrifood system, food security, and food safety, the subjects of food and agriculture are making their way into a growing number of courses in disciplines within the social sciences and the humanities, like sociology and food…

The majority of recent publications on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union address current issues and specific applications. There is little available which attempts to increase understanding of the nature of existing policies, their development, intentions, problems and…

Developing More Sustainable Production and Consumption

Meat and dairy production and consumption are in crisis. Globally sixty billion farm animals are used for food production every year. It is well accepted that methane emissions from cattle and other livestock are major contributors to greenhouse gas levels and to climate change. The Food and…